by Tom Hron
Connolly checked his watch. Forty-four minutes left, but only thirty of that was usable. The Raptor had to be kept away from all the major populations centers.
Then Skeleter’s toneless muttering surprised him. “It’s Harry Sharp again. Drucker and he were the only ones who knew anything at all about the Aurora project. I bet he sabotaged Drucker’s flight suit. One little oxygen leak and he’s dead in seconds. That’s what I think.”
For a few moments he stared at Skeleter, then looked back at the telephone. There wasn’t time to get into it, no matter where the speculation led. He punched the speakerphone back on. “General, do you have those F-fifteens in the air?”
“Well, ah, I learned that two are on the way already. Both left a little while after Ms. Landers first called Air Command. You should hear from them any moment, Mr. President.”
An evasive answer. Grimacing, he sorely regretted not calling ACC direct. “General, are they carrying air-to-air?”
“Ah, well, I’m not sure.”
“Are you hooked up to Langley Air Base as I asked?”
“Yes, Colonel Norton’s on the other end.”
“Colonel, can you hear me?”
“Sir, yes, sir.”
“This is a direct order from me. Get two armed F-fifteens off the ground and then on Center frequency so I can talk to them. Do it now.”
“Yes, sir.”
He took a deep breath and checked his watch. Thirty-nine minutes, but only twenty-five to spare.
“Sandy, is there anything on your end?”
“The first two aircraft have just come up on Center frequency.”
“Ask them if they’re carrying weapons.”
“Center, you heard the president. Get me an answer.”
The speaker filled with radio transmissions almost too faint to hear, but then a man’s clear voice answered, “Negative on the weapons, but both have visual contact.”
“All right, tell them to rub a little paint and report to me what they see. They’ll understand.”
Next, he listened to Sandy and the controllers go back and forth on the phone and radio. The minutes ticked by. Where were the other F-15s because they were down to twenty minutes?
“Jim, I’m not sure you heard but the Raptor’s pilot is slumped sideways and isn’t responding to anything.”
He could see it all so clearly—the helmet and black sun visor leaving Drucker looking like a fallen spaceman. The gray Raptor with two Eagles on its wingtips. The waterproof sky. He pulled himself back into reality. There wasn’t time.
“Sandy, tell the pilots to return to their base, then have Center try calling the other two. We’re running short on time.”
She didn’t answer but went straight to the controllers. He listened as both pilots acknowledged the command and turned away. Less than ten minutes now, he thought. Where in hell were the other two?
“Center, Eagle zero-one, flight of two climbing flight level four-nine-zero.”
Sounds like Colonel Norton, himself. Then he heard Center in the background of the telephone.
“Roger, zero-one, turn right two-eight-zero.”
He then noticed David Skeleter was still in the office and he didn’t want him there. He hardened his face and waved him away, winging his arm. His next decision had to be made in private where no one could see the self-loathing and anxiety. Tell yourself that you’re saving countless lives, he thought, and simply do it. He would never be given any absolution, regardless of the outcome.
“Sandy, where’s the Raptor now?”
“Center, give us an answer,” she said.
One hundred nautical east of Cincinnati, replied the controller.
He heaved a breath. “Tell the pilots to advise me when they have their target.”
His secret eye saw the bright symbols on the heads-up displays—the flashing numbers and the sounds of the Doppler as it pinpointed the enemy. All you had to do was pull the trigger.
“Center, this is zero-one and we’re locked on.”
“Sandy, tell both pilots that I’m giving them a direct order. They are to fire their rockets immediately.”
He listened as Landers repeated what he had said. Had he really sounded so cold-hearted and antiseptic? Next, he heard the controller pass it along. “The president said to fire now.”
Then there was the longest silence in the world.
“Center, we’ve destroyed the target and want to return to base,” a hollow voice said at last.
“Roger, turn left one-zero-zero, descend and maintain flight level three-three-zero.”
In life, everyone must go on, Connolly thought. The phone clicked and he knew that General Lockhart had hung up—when the time was right, he had to do something about him. The nation needed more people like Sandy. Then he heard her on the phone.
“Mr. President, what you did took great courage.”
He let out a long sigh. “Not courage … only, I guess, caring about all the people who might have been hurt or killed. I forced myself to say the words.”
“Were you a pilot once?”
“Long time ago.”
“Can I do anything else?”
“Tell Air Traffic Control how much I appreciate what they’ve done, then call the pilots and say I’ll phone them tomorrow. They were brave.”
“I’ll tell them.”
“Sandy, you were wonderful as well.”
“Thank you, Mr. President.”
Then the phone went dead and he was left standing in an empty room. How could the silence be so oppressive? he wondered. However, the silence wouldn’t last long, given the press core would be gathering like hyenas. He had no idea how he’d ever answer their questions, since half of the country’s population must have been scared witless when they’d heard the Raptor explode. He walked to a window and stared despondently past his refection. Moreover, how could he ever explain with everything the nation had gone through since 9/11? He had completely underestimated his enemies and now there was no hope at all that he could save his presidency, let alone win reelection. He had been set up like a chump. His duplicity had backfired and now he was facing impeachment and prison time. The public would never accept his complete failure as commander in chief. He couldn’t even protect them from the Air Force.
His secretary’s voice hit him like cold rain. “Jordan’s prime minister is here, and he’s been waiting.”
Whom could he trust? he wondered as he started back to his desk, and how could you tell when psychosis was setting in? For the first time in his life, he felt like giving up.
CHAPTER 22
THE PLAZA HOTEL
The limousine pulled away from the Forest Oak Cemetery and drove north on Interstate 95 toward Baltimore and Philadelphia. For a few moments Harry studied the young woman they had picked up—tall, red hair, honeyed tan, the beauty of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model, although now looking rather witch-like with her black cat and wrinkled clothing. Four of the bluest eyes he had ever seen returned his gaze. “Who are you?” he demanded.
“Alexis Mundy. I grew up in Vermont.”
“Why are you looking for me, and who sent you?”
“No one sent me.” She took a noisy breath. “I saw your picture in the USA Today and decided the people who want to kill me must also want to kill you. I’m trying to stop them.”
“That really doesn’t answer my question, let alone make any sense.” He gave her a cogent stare. “What makes you think anyone wants to kill you, let alone me?”
“The president’s Security Council wiretapped Senator Jefferies, murdered your ex-wife to make it look like he was involved, then ran your photograph in all the major newspapers. If they don’t get you, some terrorist certainly will, with Iran or al-Qaida getting the blame. Jefferies and you must have been working together on something, at least that’s what I think, so now they’re after you. It made me believe that you were the only person I could trust who has a common denominator with me. Everyone else is hunting me
like I’m a serial killer.”
He stared at her in stunned silence. Wiretap. Suddenly things were making a lot more sense. How could he have been so stupid? Catherine hadn’t been told Jefferies had asked him to work as a counteragent with instructions to uncover any espionage in the manufacturing and testing of the Aurora. Both had wanted to spare her feelings and thus had kept their mouths shut. But neither had been smart enough to guess that Skeleter had bugged the Hart Senate Office Building and knew all about their plan. Their recklessness had cost Catherine her life and now he was so grief-stricken he could barely look at the young woman across from him. “Who do you think is looking for you?” he asked after a guilty silence.
“The Agency, the FBI, Daniel Reechi, even the Mossad is hunting me.”
“Mossad,” choked Shawki, looking as if he’d swallowed the wrong way. “You are sure?”
“Yes, and they even tried recruiting me. They wanted to find the mycobacterium before anyone else did, the CIA for example.”
The limo’s intercom filled the back seats with Apache Joe’s voice. “I told you guys that you wouldn’t believe how big this thing is, just like I said back in Bahrain. And I bet we don’t know half of it yet.”
Harry turned to Alexis again. “I don’t get this mycobacterium being lost at the end of World War Two. How does that have anything to do with me, or you for that matter? It sounds like complete nonsense and doesn’t correlate with anything at all.”
“That’s not true. Reechi shows up at the CIA and wants to know what old files I’d read, then I learn that he works for the White House, next he shows up on the Abraham Lincoln and your picture gets plastered all over the world, lastly Senator Jefferies tells me that he knows Reechi. That’s way too much coincidence for me.”
She has scored some points, thought Harry, but the whole thing still sounded convoluted, as well as far-fetched. There had to be a major piece missing if he were to make any sense out of it.
“Who else knows about this?”
“No one. I tried talking to Jefferies but that almost got me arrested. You and I are the wild cards in this whole thing, and they want us eliminated.”
Shawki’s face still looked like he was asphyxiated. “By everything that’s sacred to me we cannot let the Mossad have a genetically designed disease, even if it was meant to kill the Jewish people only. Israel is researching that very thing right now for use against their enemies, and it must be destroyed.
“And letting the CIA have it would not be better. I don’t trust them, especially after what this beautiful lady has told us. We must find the Black Dragon before they do.”
Alexis answered before Harry could even sort out his thoughts. “He’s right,” she said. “Israel, in fact, is studying ethnic diseases predisposed to the Middle East. Gene hunting is the hot, new research field for almost every nation in the world. The problem is most people don’t understand it’s not always for peaceful purposes. Can you imagine what Iran or Syria would give for a mycobacterium lepry that would only infect Jews?”
Everything was suddenly getting even more convoluted, leaving him with no sense of reality, although he suspected a lot of it was Shawki wanting to get him out of town until he wasn’t so angry about Catherine’s death. He then wondered what she would have wanted him to do, since she had always been so fearful, yet she had cared about people so much. Then again, was he getting himself get talked into another dangerous escapade where he could self-destruct? Clearly, Skeleter was behind this as well, at least if any of what Alexis had told him was to be believed. It’s a lot bigger than you think… What was the link between the Aurora and the Black Dragon, for God’s sake? Nothing matched up. “What do you think, Joe? he asked after another long pause. “Should we believe any of this nonsense?”
“Make her tell us the whole story and then maybe we can find out if she’s making things up. The fellow I conked on the head back there wasn’t spying on her for nothing. Granted, he was snooping around for you, but I could tell he was trying to figure out what she was up to as well. She could be well telling the truth, you know, seeing how weird all of this has been.”
“Someone was watching me?” asked Alexis, staring up front in disbelief.
“A FBI agent who was pretending to be a preacher,” said Joe. “I made myself invisible, snuck up on him, and tied him up with duct tape. He was working a stakeout for Harry.”
“Joe loves duct tape completely,” Shawki remarked, “and never leaves home without it. He will take it to the happy hunting grounds someday, I think.”
Luckily, Joe’s response was lost in the noisy sounds of the road.
Harry asked Alexis for her purse and travel bag, searched both for concealed cameras and listening devices, then patted her down, leastwise as much as he could with a sense of decency in the cramped space of the car. She was clean and appeared legitimate, although with a story a mile long. All right, he told her, give it to us straight and don’t leave anything out, because we want to understand why you chose us, of all people, to help you. He then leaned back and watched her hands and eyes. They were like children when a person lied, seldom still for long.
For an hour, she narrated the odyssey she’d survived since Dewey Chambers had been killed, nearly matching the maelstrom that Harry, Shawki, and Joe had faced for days on end. Logic suggested, she told them, that her boss had seen the names of the Black Dragon and SiddhArtha used together in the same context. Had it been in the top-secret file that she hadn’t been given? It must have been, otherwise how could he have known both code names in the first place? However, why had he told her that he was staying home when he’d apparently been on his way to the World Jewish Congress, which he must have known was a popular hangout for the Mossad? Had they tried recruiting him, just as they’d tried recruiting her, and he’d gotten cold feet and hit the panic button? Had he been murdered because of what he knew or because of what he was about to learn? It was straight-forward logic, except it led nowhere and made almost no sense. Then she suddenly looked as if she were punch-drunk and asked where they were taking her. Please let me sleep, she begged, because I can’t take this anymore.
Harry told her the Plaza Hotel in New York and that she could sleep if she wanted, and they’d wake her when they got there. Hugging her cat to her breast, she curled up on the back seat and closed her eyes, then her breathing slowed and her eye lids fluttered, showing that she had fallen into a deep sleep. He studied her once more, afterward glanced at Shawki. “Do you believe anything of what she’s said?” he asked softly.
“Yes, I think so.” Then throwing up a small shrug, he went on, “Think about it, who else could she have gone to but us, actually? Your whole government is hunting her, and no one could make up a lie like this, besides.”
Three against one, he thought, or four if you threw in the cat, since Joe had already made his feelings known. Like a traveler lost in his memories, he switched off the dome light and stared out of the window beside him so he could see the night and sense its stillness. His mother had once written a poem saying that life was a tapestry, each weaves his own … He had never loved anyone but Catherine and now she was gone, bludgeoned to death by someone from the White House, or so he was being told. The outrage he had felt on the Abraham Lincoln ignited inside him once again, and he remembered his mad dash to New York after hearing about her murder.
The Easyrider pilots had flown Vice Admiral Axelrod and him across the Persian Gulf in pursuit of Shawki’s dhow so he could retrieve his friends. They had found the dhow halfway to Bahrain and had hoisted Joe, the dogs, and Shawki aboard the Easyrider with a rescue line. A half hour later, they were at the Manama airport with Shawki on the phone with his father, and in another half hour they were airborne with the royal family’s G-V, Gulfstream’s premier executive jet. Where the White House’s G-III had nickel-plated accompaniments, this one had gold, and where the III had dual Honeywell and Collins avionics, this one had triple. Forty million, sixty million, who knew what the e
mir had paid for it, but inarguably it was one of world’s finest airplanes.
With the engines at maximum cruise power, he’d flown across Saudi Arabia and Jordan, over the Mediterranean past Greece, then across Italy, Switzerland, and France, finally shooting an instrument approach into London’s murky Heathrow, the world’s busiest airport. An hour later, they were crossing the North Atlantic with a fresh load of fuel and cleared direct to New York’s La Guardia Airport at flight-level five-zero-zero. The weather had been down in the Big Apple and he’d shot another approach, this time at night. The rising circles of light had looked as if they had descended into the Milky Way when he’d busted out of the clouds, with city lights as far as they could see. After sixteen hours and 7,000 miles he was back home.
U.S. Customs had presented the next problem, since he’d known the moment the agents checked their computers his name would pop up as wanted by the FBI. But Axelrod in his full Navy regale, Shawki in his white robes and Kaffiyeh, and “Enrique Maria Madero” and his two border collies had started such a circus that he’d been able to slip off the Gulfstream unnoticed, which hadn’t been that hard to do in the dead of night. A little while later, all were on their way to the Plaza Hotel for some sleep.
Late that same day Shawki and he had visited the Theater District along Broadway and bought makeup and disguises for use when they attended Catherine’s funeral services. Shawki would go as an Army sergeant and he as a graying ponytail in a plain business suit. On the following day, they had driven to D.C., dropped off Axelrod at the Pentagon, and then gone to the wake. The Resthaven had been where they had first noticed the redhead with the snoopy eyes. What was she up to, they had wondered, since she didn’t appear to be a federal agent? Little could they have guessed, and goes to show you, he thought to himself. But in any case, he was now running on empty…
“Harry, wake up,” said Shawki. “We are at the hotel.”
Straightening himself, he saw that he’d fallen asleep, although he felt no less worn out than before. Catherine’s death had drained him, and it had become impossible to separate his emotions, since the shock, the anger, and the heartbreak had coalesced into one. It must be the punishment for the selfishness and indifference that had cost Catherine her life, he thought. However he looked at it, he’d made a terrible mistake in working with Jefferies.